Before a seller puts their property on the market, they must have all property inspections carried out before marketing themselves or listing through a real estate agent.
The reasons why performing these inspections before looking for a buyer are so important include:
1. Pricing
2. Know the exact nature of the property
3. Misrepresentation
4. Avoid price renegotiations
5. Errors and Omissions Insurance
6. Maintain arm’s length negotiations
The third reason concerns false declarations or more precisely how to avoid making false declarations.
When a genuinely interested buyer looks at the property, they will most likely have questions about the property. Since real estate agents cannot be relied upon to provide the answers, a seller must be able to turn to someone or something else for the proper answers. The buyer’s estate agent will not know the property so cannot be expected to know and if the seller is unlucky enough to have a listing agent these agents and their own forms indicate perfectly that all their information comes from the seller in any case.
So what a seller needs to do to have the right answers available is to have a professional home inspector perform the necessary inspections before the property is put up for sale.
A seller can handle property-specific questions in four ways:
1. Based on information from inspection reports
2. Information that sellers definitely know the answer to (NO GUESSING)
3. It’s perfectly acceptable to answer that the seller just doesn’t know the answer
4. Offer the buyer the opportunity to get the answers elsewhere.
Remember that incorrect answers may later be interpreted as false or misleading answers.
At some point in the sales process, it will become inevitable that these reports will be made.
It is entirely in the SELLER’S INTEREST to maintain this control and to have these inspections carried out at its own expense. It will always save the seller time, aggravation and money.